Bug 400298

Summary: bootchart not collecting data
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.0 Reporter: Casual J. Programmer <casualprogrammer>
Component: BootloaderAssignee: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: RC 1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86   
OS: openSUSE 11.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Beta-Customer Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Casual J. Programmer 2008-06-13 20:34:31 UTC
after installing bootchart ( zypper in bootchart ) and typing init=/sbin/bootchartd in boot options nothing peculiar happens.

Typing bootchart after logging in states:

bootchart
/var/log/bootchart.tgz not found

bootchart-0.9-220
kernel-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae
Comment 1 Casual J. Programmer 2008-06-14 14:32:12 UTC
Actually it seems, that this is not a bootchart malfunction, but rather a boot parameter one. 

Typing init= at the boot prompt, or entering it in /boot/grub/menu.lst simply is ignored, whatever init= is addressing.
Comment 2 Casual J. Programmer 2008-06-14 14:42:43 UTC
Excerpt from man bootparam:

 General Non-device Specific Boot Arguments
       'init=...'
              This  sets the initial command to be executed by the kernel.  If
              this is not set,  or  cannot  be  found,  the  kernel  will  try
              /sbin/init,  then  /etc/init,  then  /bin/init, then /bin/sh and
              panic if all of this fails.
Comment 3 Casual J. Programmer 2008-06-14 18:01:47 UTC
Forget comment #1, 

I did not realize that installing bootchart already adds init=/sbin/bootchartd to the boot parameters. Removing it makes init= work as expected.

So it's back to comment #0 bootchartd doesn't seem to get executed at all.

If calling it from a terminal as

/sbin/bootchartd start; sleep 10; /sbin/bootchartd stop

it works as expected and creates /var/log/bootchart.tgz which can be converted to 

bootchart.png by invoking bootchart

Comment 4 Casual J. Programmer 2008-06-14 18:46:29 UTC
Closing as INVALID

The explanation is: bootchartd is writing the collected data to /tmp, I had yast2 sysconfig System/Cron/CLEAR_TMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP set to /tmp.

Obviously Cron clears /tmp _after_ bootchart had written to it, so all traces were gone :-(